


Missouri Tornado

by Sholio



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Asthma, Backstory, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, Movie: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-21 11:21:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11356464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: For a prompt on Tumblr about young Peter having asthma and Yondu helping him through an attack.





	Missouri Tornado

**Author's Note:**

> This is for a lovely prompt from Tumblr:
> 
> _could u write a prompt whenever you have time with young peter and yondu? Maybe pete has asthma or something when they abduct him, and nobody on the ship understands it + yondu just thinks he's weak, until he has an attack one day, and yondu becomes super protective and caring and tries to help him with the inhaler or stuff?_
> 
> I don't have asthma, so hopefully this isn't too far off. Epinephrine (adrenaline) actually is an older treatment for asthma, until newer drugs came along, and the internet, at least, says that you can treat a severe asthma attack with an epi-pen if there's no inhaler available.

With the ominous inevitability of a Missouri tornado descending on the little town where he and his mom used to live, Peter feels an attack coming on -- lungs clenching, throat closing up -- and he thinks desperately, _no, no, no ... not here, not now ... Mom, help ..._

(He doesn't pray to God anymore. Mom wouldn't like it, but he stopped praying to God the day she died. It's Mom he asks for things, mostly, when there's something he really, desperately needs.)

(And all he needs right now is air.)

He's with some of Yondu's guys, heading back to the M-ship from a job on a planet whose name he can't remember. Trying to remember the names of all the planets he's been to, just in the year or so he's been on Yondu's ship, is worse than trying to memorize the names of the states in social studies class. This one has a yellow sky and a smoky, scorched smell in the air. And that's probably not helping with the lungs (he remembers how dust and smoke used to give him attacks), as he's hustled along in the middle of a jostling, laughing group of Ravagers who are tossing back and forth the leather sack containing the jewels Peter just crawled through approximately forty miles of vents to obtain.

(Lots of dust in the vents, too. That's not helping either.)

He gasps, stumbles -- if he could just _stop_ for a minute --

Yondu, bringing up the rear, almost trips over him. "Move, boy," he snaps, catching Peter by the collar of his coat and hauling him forward. Unlike the rest of them, Yondu's not sharing in the party atmosphere, except for an occasional brief, sharp-toothed smile. He keeps looking around, glancing over his shoulder, trying to hustle them back to the ship and offworld before the museum's security notices they've been robbed.

Peter is dragged for a few steps before he manages to get his feet under him again. He clenches his fists until the nails press into his palms, trying to keep up, trying not to fall down again, trying to get enough air even when it feels like knives are stabbing his throat and digging under his ribs.

And he's trying not to be terrified, scared down to the cores of his bones in a way even the Ravagers don't scare him, not in the beginning and not now; scared in a way he wasn't scared the handful of times that they've sent him into tight places to pull out something or other. Stealing stuff is _exciting._ (And wrong, yes, he tells himself that, but he still can't get past the thrill of it. He's only nine, after all.) And even if space, and the Ravagers, and Yondu, could kill him in a million ways, it's still as much of a grand adventure as a terrifying one.

But _this_ \-- this is a fear he's lived with ever since he can remember. There's nothing _but_ fear to the way he's sobbing for air while his pulse hammers in his ears, bumped and pushed along by the Ravagers' legs and the tails of their long coats.

There's some part of Peter that's always known he'd suffocate to death someday.

He used up the last few puffs of his inhaler months ago. Since then, he's skated by on luck and desperation, trying to avoid things that he knows set him off. Unfortunately his new life is composed of a whole lot of those things, like exercise and stress and dusty, smoky places. The whole time, his biggest worry (besides not dying) has been making sure the Ravagers, and Yondu especially, don't find out about it.

Peter's had enough kids in school kick the crap out of him for being small and sickly and weak that he doesn't want to guess what the Ravagers would do to him if they knew his lungs didn't work right.

And then they're all hurrying up the ramp of the M-ship, though Peter is only vaguely aware of his surroundings by this point, and it's only somebody's implacable grip on his collar that drags him the last few steps onto the ship. He's thrown unceremoniously onto the filthy metal deck plates, and by that point, all he can do is curl into a ball and fight for air.

He's very dimly aware that he's being dragged off somewhere, dimly aware of a rough voice above his head snapping, "You! Fly this damn ship an' get us off this ball of dirt!" And there's a vague worry that he might be in trouble for passing out on a job. But if Yondu's gonna kill him, it might almost be better than the nightmare of suffocation that's haunted him ever since he was four years old.

 

***

 

Yondu's first thought is that the kid's been poisoned by something on the planet. So far, they've been lucky that it turns out Terrans are close enough relations to the other humans and humanoids of the galaxy that most of the same rules apply. If it won't poison Kraglin, it's about 99% sure that it won't poison Quill. Still, there's always a few people in every population that are allergic to damn near _anything._ And there's no telling what the kid ran into when he was crawling around in the museum ductwork. 

Then, too, Quill's always been a little bit of a wimp. Doesn't like to run much, that kind of thing. Could be he got into something he shouldn't; could be he's just out of breath from trying to keep up with the adults.

There's not much privacy on an M-ship with a dozen Ravagers on board, so Yondu hauls the gasping, wheezing kid behind one of the bulkheads back of the cabin, pulls him upright (or as upright as he can get him) and kneels so he can get right up in the kid's face. "Boy! What the hell's the matter with you?"

The only answer he gets is a high-pitched wheezing, and as he takes in the child's red, sweaty face and obvious terror, it starts to sink in (like a cold hand clamped around his heart) that something is really, truly wrong.

The first thing he thinks of, out of nowhere, is Gliss.

He forgot about Gliss. Genuinely forgot about her, until this very moment.

She was one of the only friends he had as a little kid, a slightly older kid who used to look out for him and the rest of the smaller children. She tried to make sure they got extra food, broke up fights, interfered with bullies, and generally did her best to look out for the littler kids.

But there was something wrong with her heart or her lungs. Something that made it hard for her to get enough air in a fight. Even then, at such a terribly young age, he knew she couldn't possibly make it through their brutal battle-slave training. Still, she had managed to hide it from their keepers for a long time. She'd compensated in other ways, mostly by helping the other children so they covered for her.

And then it had happened at last. She'd fallen, gasping, during a training bout, writhing on the ground, struggling for air.

There was no place for battle slaves who would never reward their owners' investment in them. No place, and no mercy.

Yondu wishes now that her face had never come back into his mind, wishes he didn't remember the cruel, impersonal efficiency of the overseer's battle lance glistening with Gliss's green blood, plunging through her chest to silence her defective breathing forever.

(Years from now, infinitely far away from the Kree slave pens in space and time, he will meet Quill's fierce green-skinned girlfriend when he scoops them both out of deep space outside Knowhere, and he'll think of Gliss again. And maybe that's part of the reason why he'll be so _angry_ at Green Girl, at Quill, at both of them: because she made Quill dive into vacuum to save her; because Quill _did_ save her where Gliss is nothing but long-crumbled bones under a desert sun, and even knowing it was long ago and only a fool cares about the past doesn't always help.)

But all of that is far in the future and right now he has hold of a child who's shaking, struggling to breathe with a violence that wracks his tiny frame. Yondu doesn't know what's wrong, but he can tell it's bad.

"Kraglin!" he barks, and the scrawny teenager shows up an instant later with a yelped, "Cap'n!" 

"Go see if the med locker's got adrenaline patches. Bring me a handful. Human standard if you can find it."

Give the kid his due -- he doesn't ask questions before dashing off. M-ship doesn't have much in the way of medical facilities, just what they need for patching up Ravagers hurt on a raid; all the good medical stuff is on the _Eclector._ But they ought to have adrenaline. It's pretty similar for most of the humanoid races in the galaxy, it's useful for everything from dealing with allergies to restarting a stopped heart to giving someone a jolt of energy to get them through a fight, and therefore, along with painkillers, it's one of the standard medkit supplies the galaxy over. If the supply is out on this ship, then whoever's on restocking duty is getting his ass kicked as soon as Yondu figures out who the guilty party is.

Meanwhile, he's got a sick, sweaty kid on his hands. Quill's trying to cough, trying to breathe, and doing a damn lousy job of both. His lips are turning blue.

Yondu's first urge is to shake him, and he does, but Quill hardly reacts, teeth snapping together as his eyes roll back in his head.

Yondu curses under his breath. "L'il bastard," he mutters, and -- pressing his shoulder against the bulkhead for balance -- he grips the boy's face with hands that are made for handing weapons, not children. He swipes a finger through Quill's mouth to see if he's got something caught in there.

Quill tries to bite him and makes a tiny, gargled spitting sound, and that makes Yondu grin fiercely. Somewhere in a deep part of his soul (right next door to the part that's sick with terror, if he could even spare the attention to deny it to himself) there's a little bright candle flaring with something that might just be pride. Quill's still in there, however sick he is. Kid might be a wimp about certain things (and somewhere else in the back of Yondu's brain, there is a sudden flash of insight about why that might be, to be explored at a less critical time) but he's still fighting.

And there's nothing else visibly wrong with him except he just can't get air. 

"You look at me, boy," Yondu snaps at him, using his grip on the kid's face to turn him so Yondu's staring into the desperate, tear-filled green eyes -- desperate and terrified and (Yondu's oddly grateful to see) furious. "I'm your Cap'n an' you ain't got permission to quit breathin' on me, so knock it off. Deep breaths, boy. Deep breaths an' that's an order."

From the pent-up fury in that fierce green stare, he's pretty sure that if Quill had breath for it, Yondu would be getting an earful right now, probably some complaining like _I can't!_ and excuses along those lines. But it's one hell of a lot better than the fear, because right now fury seems to be winning and as far as he can tell from the look on the boy's face, Quill is now struggling to get a breath just so he can yell at Yondu.

"Here, Cap'n." Kraglin drops to his knees beside him, panting like he's been running all the way, both ways. He shoves a fistful of patches and injectors at Yondu.

The patches are easier to use, but the pre-packaged injectors deliver their load more quickly. Yondu drops the kid so he's got both hands free -- Quill falls into his lap, more or less -- and as he grabs up a handful of drugs and starts sorting through them, he snaps at Kraglin, "Get up there an' see if Tullk's managed to get us on a proper heading for the ship this time or not." Because having someone hovering over him sure ain't helpful at this particular juncture.

"Yes, sir," Kraglin says, and with a last look back, lingering on the kid, he goes. The kid ... who wraps his small fists in two handfuls of Yondu's coat and curls forward, his face inches from Yondu's chest. His body bucks as he wheezes for breath.

Yondu rips the wrapping off an injector containing mainstream-galactic human adrenaline and presses it to the back of the boy's neck under the sweat-soaked fringe of overgrown hair. He pushes the button and Quill jerks against him. "Yeah, that's gonna hurt," Yondu says, and hears another strangled, incomprehensible sound of fury. He grins, can't help it, and he drops the injector and puts his hand on the boy's thin back, pulling Quill against him because -- because --

Because the boy just pulled off a successful heist, and there's every possibility something he ran into on the planet just sent him into some kind of fit, so if Yondu wants him to keep pulling jobs for the Ravagers, dropping him on the deck and leaving him to choke doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.

Yeah, that's a good reason.

"Deep breaths," he says into the kid's hair, as he holds Quill against his chest, his coat spilling around them and his bulk blocking the trembling child from the casual view of passing Ravagers. "Breathe with me. In and out. Slow. There you go." Kid's hair smells like dust and fear-sweat and scared Terran. It's not a bad smell, not something that Yondu has a mind to complain about. Slowly the shivering and the too-rapid heaving of the little rib cage under his hand starts to slow down and get more regular, the boy's shaky breathing syncing with Yondu's own deliberately slow and measured breaths.

Yondu rubs his hand up and down the kid's back because -- well -- it's just the thing that feels right. Gotta stop the boy from working himself up into a panic state and jeopardizing their getaway.

Peter's panicked wheezing gives way to slow breaths that dampen the front of Yondu's wool tunic between the flaps of the coat, and that's actually a pretty good feeling, all things considered. He's not gonna have to train himself a new Terran after all.

With a sudden jerk, Peter wrenches away, and Yondu sits back on his heels. The boy rubs the back of his fist vigorously across his mouth. 

_"You put your hand in my mouth!"_

"Thought you was chokin'," Yondu points out reasonably.

"Gah!" Peter retorts. He reels into the bulkhead. Yondu reaches out to steady him, and it's a genuine relief when the kid shakes his hand off. A Peter who's weak and shaky and clinging onto his coat is something he doesn't know how to deal with. Peter glaring at him and trying to hit him is a much more comfortable situation for both of them.

 

***

 

Peter's not sure what's in the plastic-wrapped patches Yondu gives him. All he knows is, it makes him feel terrible whenever he uses one (jittery, keyed up, his heart racing too fast). It's not nearly as good as his inhaler. But it makes the awful squeezing in his chest recede, lets him pull in a full breath, and so with a lot of scowls in Yondu's direction, he carries a pocketful around with him everywhere.

And it's probably two or three months later (he still can't quite figure out how ship time relates to Earth time) when they just happen to be on one of the more industrialized worlds in the Nova Empire for some ship repairs, and Yondu takes his inhaler to a lady who runs a cut-rate med clinic, who takes some samples of spit and blood from Peter, and comes out of the back with something that looks like one of the patches Peter's been using. But instead of putting it on Peter's skin, Yondu presses it into the little metal crescent of the space helmet that he's already taught Peter how to use. So now, whenever Peter pushes the button that makes the helmet cover his face, it reads his breathing and, if he needs it, gives him a little puff of something that has exactly the faint medicinal taste of his inhaler.

And it's maybe a year or two later when they're on another high-tech planet where Yondu marches Peter into a big medical complex and -- after a bunch more tests, and quietly passing his thumb across a credit slip (which Peter glimpses, and is faintly boggled by the number of zeroes that Yondu is just casually _paying_ ) -- walks out with a little metal thing that's supposed to go on Peter's ribs. When Peter puts it on himself in the relative privacy of the head, there's a sharp sting and it buries itself in the soft flesh between two of his ribs. He jerks in reaction, and stares at the metal glint in the cracked, dingy mirror, and tells himself that Yondu wouldn't do anything that would stop Peter from being able to effectively steal things -- that's why he's on the ship, after all.

And, though it stings a little, over the next month or so the metal thing stays embedded in his ribcage and releases a slow dose of something that makes his lungs feel itchy and weird. But it makes the tight feeling go away almost completely. He can _run._ He can crawl around in tight spaces and never feel a twinge. He's still got the helmet and a handful of replacement patches for it, and he's glad he's got it, because the asthma never quite goes away completely. He'll sometimes get a little tightness in his chest, even as an adult. But all he has to do is deploy the helmet for a minute or two, and he'll be okay.

 

***

 

Years later, when he's searching the third quadrant for toys to lay on the bed of flowers that Groot and Mantis are quietly and solemnly constructing around Yondu's body, he finds his old inhaler in a drawer. At first he just stares at it. He'd long since lost track of it. And then the thought occurs to him that maybe if you might need to replicate a drug again, having the original source was exactly the sort of practical precaution that Yondu would plan for.

He lays it on the funeral pyre, a little piece of white plastic from circa-1988 Missouri. It's the only way of saying thank you that he knows how to offer, and maybe the only one that Yondu would understand.


End file.
